The Inauguration Event, a local view

Hey.

Sweety and I (and a lot of other folks who live here) are hunkering down and hiding in our houses for the weekend.  There are a few of our friends who are heading down to the Mall for some of the events yesterday, today and tomorrow (Sun-Tues), however, most of us who don’t like crowds are happy to watch things on TV. 

However, the impact is spreading far and wide over our area.  First, let’s get you familiar with the DC area:

So, you can see — we have the Potomac river splitting the map, the left side is Virginia, DC is the diamond shape in the middle (gray line), the rest on the right is Maryland.  I-495 is our Capital Beltway.  Note that i-95 leaves the picture in the lower left, heading for Richmond and everything south, and leaves the picture on the upper right, heading for Baltimore, Philly, and New York.  so, you can imagine the traffic that runs around our beltway.  Now throw in all the commuters from points south, west, and north heading into town for all sorts of things.

Now, here’s the map of road closures for the events, from the Washington Post:

All the bridges from Virginia into DC are closed to regular traffic.  Busses, emergency vehicles, bicycles and foot traffic only.  This leaves only the Capital Beltway bridges at the extreme north and south as open to regular traffic.  The Maryland govenor has announced, repeatedly "just stay off the Beltway!" till Wednesday.  They’ve closed I-66 and I-395 inside the beltway, with restrictions in force now (Monday morning) and only getting worse tomorrow.  This means that all that traffic is forced to use the major thoroughfares instead, which means all the traffic everywhere on the surface streets is gonna be miserable.  We have those portable traffic warning signs all over the neighborhoods – it’s quite amazing and intimidating.  Luckily, we can walk to the grocery store if we absolutely need to, although I made sure we had enough stuff — kind of like stocking up for a blizzard or hurricane.

A couple of comments:

I am very heartened by this tremendous sense of optimism and joy and je ne sais quoi about the inauguration of Obama.  Really, it is amazing, and I’m caught up in it too.  I’ve remarked to several folks lately, I wonder how McCain feels right now, because I think we all know that we would not be having such a shindig fais-do-do if he had won.  Poor guy. 

Second, I really hope this works out at least a fraction as well as we all hope it will. 

I do hope for the best for all of us.  Take care, everyone, and Happy Inauguration.  May a new day dawn for us all.

hugs

Jude